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September 6, 2017 — Failure to account for the consumption of food outside the home has important implications for poverty and inequality measures, as well as the understanding of who the poor are.
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Behaviorally informed policy emphasizes the importance of context for decision making and behavior. It examines a wide set of influences, paying attention to the social, psychological, and economic factors that affect what people think and do. It addresses details in bureaucracies, technologies, and service delivery that are often overlooked in standard policy design but that dramatically influence the effectiveness of development programs and projects, especially in low-income contexts. Behaviorally informed policy can provide creative solutions to difficult challenges, often at low cost. Finally, it helps policy makers themselves avoid some of the decision traps and biases that affect all individuals.

The Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD), the World Bank’s behavioral sciences team, works closely with project teams, governments, and other partners to diagnose, design, and evaluate behaviorally informed interventions. By collaborating with a worldwide network of scientists and practitioners, the eMBeD team provides answers to important economic and social questions, and contributes to the global effort to eliminate poverty and increase equity.

Currently, we have more than 80 behaviorally informed projects underway across 50 countries in a wide range of sectors, from health, gender, education, environment, WASH, to financial inclusion, jobs, and taxation.

Learning

Peru, Indonesia, and South Africa: Acquiring a growth mindset and increasing academic achievement. How do you motivate students to learn more? This intervention intends to change the beliefs and perceptions of middle-school students by showing them that intelligence is malleable and learning abilities can be developed with effort, perseverance and learning from failure.

Peru: Motivating Teachers. More than a half of the teachers in Peru think that their role in society is not valued and exhibit some dissatisfaction with their career. In this project, we experimented with a weekly SMS campaign targeting teachers that informed them about school and non-school benefits and also shared motivational messages.

Peru: Reducing teacher absenteeism. Although Peru exhibits overall low levels of teacher absenteeism, attendance rates are inferior in the poorest and remotest areas. The project consists of sending teachers weekly text or email messages on the importance of attending school using pro-social and social norms framing approaches.

Guatemala: Reducing dropouts. Despite near universal primary enrolment rates, around a third of students in Guatemala drop out during the transition from primary to lower secondary. Currently, student-level administrative data is being used to develop an Early Warning System that can predict which students are at-risk of dropping out. This project evaluates the impact of informing school directors about at-risk students, and the relative effectiveness of supplementing this with guidance on preventing dropouts, reminders, goal-setting, and non-pecuniary awards or raffle prizes to recognize top performing schools.

FYR Macedonia: Using socio-emotional skills development to motivate middle schoolers. With an increasing young population not working nor studying, the education system of FYR Macedonia needs to equip students with skills to access a wider set of opportunities. This semester-long intervention provides socio-emotional skills to middle school students through self-paced and teacher-trained lessons on perseverance. The program aims to change students’ attitudes on gender and ethnicity and also teachers’ attitudes as they can demotivate students.

Bulgaria & Serbia: Changing social norms to address the gender gap in skills. The Roma communities in both countries have consistently faced limited access to education, job opportunities, and decent housing. This project aims to identify and empower adolescent girls and their families through delivering targeted information to prioritize education and training, and support them in adapting to new gender roles through a normative messaging campaign.

Mexico: Reducing high-school dropouts (PODER- Programa de Oportunidades y Desarrollo para Evitar Riesgos). Forty percent of students in Mexico drop out between 10th and 12th grade, making it a major challenge for the country. Aiming to reduce the problem, the World Bank and the Mexican government are conducting an intervention delivered by teachers that combine Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with math tutoring.

Nicaragua:Improving parenting practices. Children from rural areas exhibit large development delays urging the government to invest in health and educational outcomes of children. By engaging with parents more frequently through daily text messages with information about health, nutrition, stimulation, and environment, the project seeks to encourage better caring practices that improve nutrition and academic performance of their children.

India: Technical education. In collaboration with ideas42, we are partnering with postsecondary institutions in India to explore how behavioral interventions can increase student retention in quality postsecondary programs. Potential behavioral interventions to address psychological barriers to retention and completion includes affirmations to reinforce values and abilities, reminders about enrollment deadlines to maintain commitment to re-enrolling, and simplified, personalized outreach to help students choose courses.

Health

Niger: Improving nutrition of children through better water, sanitation and hygienic practices. As of 2013, almost a third of children under-2 were stunted in Niger, with higher rates in rural areas. Ongoing work is tackling malnutrition through cash transfers with accompanying behavioral measures to support parenting. As part of these measures, the project focuses on interventions to support Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) practices of family members.

Georgia: Changing social norms to address sex preference at birth. Recent evidence from Georgia shows that parents’ preference for sons is distorting sex ratio at birth, which exacerbates gender inequality across generations. The study tests the effectiveness of an information campaign in altering and influencing parental perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and behaviors toward their daughters. The campaign will be delivered through mass media and key service providers by appealing to the role of influential models.

Brazil: Adhering to tuberculosis treatment in slums of Rio de Janeiro. Tuberculosis is a treatable and completely curable disease. However, treatment adherence is challenging for patients as it requires a prolonged intake of medicines, as reflected by a wanting treatment success rate of 70% in Rio de Janeiro. The intervention seeks to promote treatment adherence for patients, using call centers and improving the patients’ journey experience to provide timely motivation, salience and feedback on the progress towards a cure.

Cameroon: Increasing uptake of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) by adolescent girls. Despite the high adolescent fertility rate in Cameroon, use of contraceptives, particularly LARCs, remain very low. This project aims to understand the interactions among social, psychological, behavioral, andneurodevelopmental processes that influence young women’s utilization of LARCs. This insights will inform the design of both demand and supply side interventions, such as counseling apps for adolescents and training for health workers, to overcome behavioral bottlenecks to LARCs uptake.

India: Changing social norms and mental models to increase toilet use. Despite efforts to improve access to better sanitation, India accounts for nearly 60% of the world's population that still defecates in the open. Beyond economic reasons, particular social norms and cultural beliefs or mental models can and do constrain toilet use. The goal of this project is to identify these normative and cultural barriers to toilet use, particularly among toilet owners, and design low-cost, community level behavioral interventions to address them.

Money

Central America: Using text reminders, framing and social norms to increase income tax compliance. Reminders are a cost-effective strategy to increase tax reporting and payment. Letters from the tax authority were sent to taxpayers (individuals and firms) who had failed to pay in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras. In them, various messages were tested such as social norms, showing how most people comply, nationalistic, framing compliance as a citizen’s responsibility and, last, as a deterrent (framing non-declaration as an intentional and deliberate choice.) The interventions increased the rate of payment as well as the average amount paid, more than tripling the tax receipts. After 12 months, the effects of the intervention persisted, sustaining the increased rate of payment.

Poland: Using behavioral letters to improve tax compliance among later payers. This intervention involved sending letters, adapted using behavioral design, from the tax authority to remind late payers of their overdue income taxes. Results showed that all behavioral letters, especially hard-tone ones, were effective at increasing payment rate and payment amount relative to standard reminder letters. Payment rates and average amount paid increased by up to 20.8 percent and 31 percent respectively, with the combination of omission and deterrence messages showing the most impact.

Latvia: Improving tax compliance. This project targets business owners that have been failing to file their income taxes in the past three years. To do so, the Latvian tax authority will send reminders at the beginning of the tax filing period randomly choosing people to receive a standard email or one with the following behavioral message: ‘ignoring notices is an intentional act of commission.’ The reminders will also highlight social norms around tax compliance.

Nicaragua: Increasing aspirations and living standards through social interactions. Can successful leaders influence their neighbors’ investment decisions? This project studies the interaction between women leaders and cash transfer beneficiaries and looks at the long-term effect on aspirations and investments in education, health and income generation.

Bangladesh: Increasing access and usage of mobile financial services for women. Women in Bangladesh do not have access to finance and are disproportionately likely to be the rural poor. In recent years, mobile financial services have tried to deepen financial inclusion in the country but women persist to be extensively excluded from these services. This project seeks to increase access to financial institution for unbanked women by specifically facilitating the process for them to open and use e-wallet accounts.

Tanzania: Increasing use of mobile money for savings. In collaboration with CGAP and Airtel (MFS provider in Tanzania), we are conducting qualitative and quantitative surveys as well as behavioral lab and lab-in-the-field experiments to identify barriers to and opportunities for increasing use of mobile financial services for savings.

Pakistan: Increasing access and usage of financial products. Almost three quarters of people living in poverty lack formal financial access due to the costs, distances and onerous requirements for opening a financial account. This program focuses on tackling two challenges preventing universal financial access: increasing access and usage of mobile financial products and services, and raising awareness and confidence of current and potential consumers.

Senegal:Boosting women’s rights to economic access. Senegal has sharp inequalities with regard to gender in the labor market, particularly in terms of access. Women are significantly more likely than men to be economically inactive and out of the labor force. This pilot project aims to support the women’s psychological agency (their capacity to act independently and to make their own free choices) by helping the center’s participants develop a growth mindset, have greater self-efficacy and achieve higher aspirations.

Moldova: Reducing envelope wages to increase tax revenue. The phenomenon of informal economy is wide-spread in many parts of the world. In Moldova, it often takes form of hidden wages, where employees are paid only part of the wage formally and the rest “in envelope”, thus avoiding taxes. In partnership with UNDP and the tax authority, we are sending behavioral letters to firms to encourage them to report higher wages in an effort to increase tax revenue.

Environment

Comoros: Make electricity services more efficient. This project consists of conducting a behavioral audit to look at bill payment behavior and behavior of utility company officials. It uses both qualitative and quantitative instruments to investigate bottlenecks (in the billing and payment processes) and behavior, social norms, beliefs, and trust on both sides (bill payments, energy theft, selling of quotas and confrontations).

Safe Societies

Jordan: Encouraging female labor force participation among refugees and Jordanian nationals. Jordan has made significant progress in educational attainment, particularly among women. However, female labor market participation is low and has recently dropped to 13 percent. The project will systematically measure social norms and cultural beliefs to better identify barriers to increased participation, and will subsequently inform interventions that aim to change these.

Work

Ethiopia: Supporting youth work aspirations. Despite Ethiopia’s strong economic growth in recent years, youth unemployment remains very high in urban areas, particularly in larger cities. Diagnostic work has identified a gap between youths’ expressed aspirations and daily economic behaviors. To tackle this, the pilot intervention aims to support the unemployed youths’ psychological agency by tailoring training sessions that address the psychological and informational constraints faced by the young people that attend the center.

Turkey: Equipping youth with socio-emotional skills that make them employable. Turkey has experienced an increase in people, particularly youth and women, seeking opportunities in the labor market. The project provides job-seekers with information and tools to set goals and shares practical strategies to persevere and sustain the motivation in their pursuit.

Turkey: Increasing employability of women by reducing gender stereotyping. This study seeks strategies to reduce gender stereotyping in the Turkish labor market by assessing how the presentation of socio-emotional (soft) skills in women´s resumes might affect call back by employers. It includes a set of discrete choice experiments with students aspiring to be hiring managers, a correspondence study, and an ImplicitAssociation Test with human resources managers.

Nicaragua: Improving women's intra-household bargaining and empowerment. Poor households struggle to cope with shocks that affect their income generation capacity and exacerbate their conditions. This study evaluates a productive transfer to help households to protect their income by diversifying its sources. Furthermore, it explores the extent by which a combination of capital, technical, and soft skills provided to women in poor rural areas led to improvements in both female income as well as intra-household decision-making.

Mindstats

Peru: Measuring teacher biases toward poor students. Do you think that the way students dress has nothing to do with their academic performance in high school? This experiment tests whether the socio economic appearance of a student can influence teachers’ judgment about their performance and behavior.

Kenya: Improving measurement of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Measures of cognitive, non-cognitive, and technical skills are used in development studies to analyze determinants of skills formation, economic decisions and labor market outcomes. Yet, these measures have mostly been validated only in developed countries. This project tests the reliability and validity of some of the most commonly used skills measures(Raven's, executive function, Big-5, self-efficacy, depression) in the context of rural Kenya.

Global: Measuring socio-emotional skills well in low and middle-income countries. Standard indicators of educational level leave an information gap on workforce skill characteristics, job skill requirements, quality of worker-job matches, working conditions, and non-earnings job rewards. This prevents policymakers from making informed and timely decisions on skills training and educational needs for current and future employees. The STEP Skills Measurement Program is a research initiative by the World Bank that aims to validate and improve collection of measures of socio-emotional skills and psychological constructs of the adult population from 14 different countries in developing settings.

Peru: Measuring welfare well. Consumption and income are the two conventional metrics to define a poverty line and measure welfare. With innovative objective and subjective welfare measures, such as the ones captured by biomarkers or activity trackers, this project aims to provide evidence of the feasibility of integrating these indicators in household surveys and to demonstrate their value as improvements to welfare measurement and consequential policy design.

Vietnam: Accounting for food consumed away from home. The measurement of food consumption is central to the assessment of multiple welfare dimensions, including nutrition and poverty. Food consumed away from home constitutes an increasingly important portion of the total expenditure but it is poorly measured in most household surveys. Building on the general guidelines known to date, this intervention tests alternative protocols aiming to identify a design that delivers accurate information on such consumption in a cost effective way.

Vietnam: Measuring well-being. Various shortcomings have been documented on the use of consumption and income as metrics of human welfare, both in accuracy and fidelity to real expenditure. This intervention will provide evidence of the feasibility and the benefits of including objective and subjective welfare indicators to socio-economic household surveys for better policy design and measurement.

The Lab

Narratives. Narrative psychology is the perspective that human beings deal with experiences by interpreting them through stories. That is, people tell stories not only to make sense of themselves and others but all experiences are understood, interpreted, and made meaningful through story telling. On the other hand, machine learning algorithm can be used to decode human narrative features including cadence, tone, volume, sentiment, word structure and patterns. This project will record stories and opinions on a broad range of topics: the experience of poverty, what it means to be successful in life, thoughts on female employment, cleanliness, and other. Through the use of machines, we will measure and understand the true beliefs, attitudes, aspirations, and emotions of respondents.

The Biases of Development Professionals. There is plenty of literature that focuses on the biases of individual decision-making and policies undertaken to mitigate them but there is little attention devoted to the biases of policymakers themselves. Using a pool of development professionals, employees of the World Bank and the Department for International Development in the UK, we conducted a series of survey vignettes using classic behavioral experiments adapted to the development context. The experiments focused on framing (gains vs. losses), risk aversion, sunk costs and confirmation biases. Early findings suggest that policymakers, similar to average individuals, are consistently biased in their decision-making. We find evidence for risk seeking in losses and risk aversion in gains, greater risk-aversion when undertaking policy decisions, sensitivity to sunk costs and prior beliefs influencing the evaluation of data (confirmation bias).

Our Team

Zeina Afif

Senior Communications Officer

Zeina Afif is a Senior Communications Officer with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank. Zeina is currently working on applying behavioral insights to improve women’s access to finance and jobs, reduce youth unemployment, reduce gender based violence, and improve access to public services and programs. Prior to joining the team, Zeina provided operational communication and behavioral insights support to World Bank projects and has worked in countries such as Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, and Yemen in the areas of taxes, social protection, social accountability, and citizen engagement. Zeina holds a MBA from George Washington University, and a M.Sc. in Behavioral Science from London School of Economics.

Jorge Luis Castaneda

Research Analyst

Jorge Luis Castaneda is an Analyst at the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. His work integrates behavioral science to the design of anti-poverty policies in a wide range of policy issues, such as education, health, early childhood development, financial inclusion, and social protection. Through his career, he has acquired expertise in the fields of applied microeconomics, experimental economics, impact evaluation, and psychology, and has an extensive experience in econometric analysis and qualitative and fieldwork research. He previously served as a Research Fellow with the Social Sector at the Inter-American Development Bank. He holds a M.Sc. in Economics from the Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia.

Samantha De Martino

Economist

Samantha De Martino is an Economist in the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice. Her research is at the nexus of applied microeconomics and behavioral science, with a focus on developing and testing new measures for understanding behavior. Her PhD thesis explored the interaction of monetary and non-monetary incentives for behavior change. She has extensive qualitative and quantitative experience in impact evaluation design and implementation of interventions for policy issues including land reform, renewable energy, environment, health, education, anti-poverty, youth unemployment and social protection in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia with the World Bank, Institute of Development Studies, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the City of Cape Town. She holds a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University and PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex.

Gabriela Farfan

Young Professional

Gabriela Farfan is a Young Professional with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. Her current work primarily involves methodological research on survey design and data collection, with a particular emphasis on poverty measurement and the integration of behavioral insights into traditional welfare measurement. She has also worked in the areas of poverty, health and nutrition, education, economics of the family, and migration. During her graduate studies she collaborated with the design and implementation of the Third Wave of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), particularly the US component of the survey which followed and interviewed Mexican migrants living in the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University.

Anna Fruttero

Senior Economist

Anna Fruttero is a Senior Economist with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank Group in Washington DC. Previously she has been a core team member of the 2015 World Development Report “Mind, Society, and Behavior”, and has worked extensively on poverty and social protection issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. She led the implementation and technical support of World Bank projects as well as analytical research on individual countries and regional studies. Her research interests include distributional impact of shocks, ex-ante and ex-post impact evaluations of social programs, and female labor force participation. She has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at New York University and Johns Hopkins University. Anna holds a PhD in Economics from New York University.

Varun Gauri

(Co-Head) Senior Economist

Varun Gauri is a Senior Economist at the World Bank. He co-directed the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Behavioral Public Policy and Health and Human Rights, the World Economic Forum Council on Behavior, the Advisory Board of Academics Stand Against Poverty, and is a member of the RSA (London). He holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D from Princeton University.

Julian Jamison

Senior Behavioral Economist

Julian Jamison is Senior Behavioral Economist with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank. Before joining the Bank he worked as an economist and served as the Section Chief of the Decision-making and Behavioral Studies group in the Office of Research at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau within the United States government. He is a Research Affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action and a fellow in the US-China Young Leaders Forum. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nina Mažar

Senior Behavioral Scientist

Nina Mažar is Senior Behavioral Scientist at the World Bank. To assume this role, she is currently on leave from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management where she is Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Behavioral Economics in Action research cluster BEAR. She was named one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” (Poets & Quants; 2014). She holds a Master of Science (Dipl. Kauffr.) and Ph.D. (Dr. rer. pol. with summa cum laude) equivalents in Management/Marketing from the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Ana Maria Muñoz Boudet

Senior Social Scientist

Ana Maria Muñoz Boudet is a Senior Social Scientist in the World Bank’s Poverty Global Practice. She has worked on gender, poverty and inequality issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia and the Africa. She is a co-author of the World Development Report 2012 on Gender Equality and Development. She holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and doctorate studies from the University College of London.

Julie Perng

Research Analyst

Julie Perng is a Research Analyst in the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice where she supports the Behavioral team. She has conducted research and worked in measurement, natural resource, experimental economics, financial inclusion, health, and education projects in the United States and the Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and Pacific, Africa and the Europe and Central Asia regions. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Tasmia Rahman

Research Analyst

Tasmia Rahman is a Research Analyst at the World Bank where she supports the design and evaluation of behavioral interventions across various policy areas. Prior to joining the Bank, she worked on research and impact evaluation projects in the areas of skills training, social protection, and tax compliance for the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation (Gui2de) and the International Growth Centre in East and West Africa, and managed a portfolio of digital finance pilots at BRAC’s Social Innovation Lab in Bangladesh. She holds a Masters in International Development Policy from Georgetown University.

Iman Sen

Research Analyst

Iman Sen is a Research Analyst at the World Bank working with projects on tax compliance, financial management, energy, and understanding social norms through the support of behavioral interventions. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked on randomized evaluations in governance, energy, health, and gender in South Asia, in different capacities for Innovations for Poverty Action(IPA), and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Iman holds Masters degrees in Economics and Computer Science from New York University.

Renos Vakis

(Co-Head) Lead Economist

Renos Vakis is a Lead Economist with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. He works on initiatives that integrate behavioral science in the design of anti-poverty policies in a wide range of issues such as financial inclusion, early childhood development, social protection, health and education. As a member of the Living Standards Measurement Study team in the Development Data Group of the World Bank, he also conducts experiments to improve household survey measures of behavioral dimensions of well-being. He has written extensively on issues related to poverty dynamics and mobility, risk management, social protection, market failures and rural development and has led the design of impact evaluation of anti-poverty interventions in various settings. Most recently, he has published a book on Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. Renos has taught economics at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

James Walsh

Research Analyst

James Walsh is a Research Analyst in the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice where he leads Behavioral Initiatives projects related to economic empowerment and child nutrition in Africa. Before joining, he was a member of the research team for the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. In 2015, he served on the faculty of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where he lectured in behavioral approaches to development economics. Prior to joining the Bank, he spent time at the Gross National Happiness Commission of the Royal Government of Bhutan and working with Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, examining multidisciplinary approaches to policymaking. He holds a BA in Economics and Political Science from Trinity College Dublin and a Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

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